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AFRICA 
AND THE WAR 



BY 

BENJAMIN BRAWLEY 

Author of "A Short History of the American Negro," 

'.' The Negro in Literature and Art," 

"Your Negro Neighbor," etc. 



The controversy with the nations is not over, nor will 
be, until the divine government is reverentially 
acknowledged by the human family. — Lorenzo Dow. 




NEW YORK I 

DUFFIELD y COMPANY I 

1918 i 



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4 ^^-^^ n 



Copyright, 1918, by 
DUFFIELD & COMPANY 



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©CI.A508429 



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CONTENTS 



CRAP, PAOS 

I. Africa 3 

II. David Livingstone 13 

III. Germany's Colonies in Africa as the Central 

Problem of the War 19 

IV. Special Problems and Difficulties .... 29 

V. The Meaning for America 35 



SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTERS 

I. The Freedom of the Free 49 

II. Wycliffe and the World War 54 

III. Lorenzo Dow 66 

IV. Thomas Carlyle, the Negro Question, and the 

Present World Problem 85 



PREFACE 

The Civil War in the United States was 
fought to decide the destiny of the Negro in 
America. The great war of our own day is to 
determine the future of the Negro in the world. 
Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium, the Balkans, and 
even Russia, all become second in importance 
to the overwhelming question of the possession 
and development of the continent of Africa. 
The Negro, not the Belgian or the Russian, is 
after all at the heart of the problem. 

The aim of the present work is not to give a 
study of African history and tradition. That 
has been done within the last few years as well 
as it is likely to be done by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois 
in his Httle book, '^The Negro.'' It is not to 
give an account of either African exploration 
or colonization. For the adequate treatment of 
these subjects the earnest reader will of course 
go to such authorities as Livingstone, Schwein- 
furth, and Johnston. • Nor is the aim to set forth 



Preface 

the part played by the native African or the 
American Negro in the war. That is all a thrill- 
ing story that will some day await the capable 
teller. The aim of the pages that follow is 
simply to set forth the striking features of a 
definite situation developed by the world con- 
flict and to indicate the meaning of this for 
America. Anything else is incidental. Each of 
the supplementary chapters, however, attempts 
to take the world view, and it is hoped that in 
a larger and more spiritual way they may be 
found to bear out some of the ideas in the more 
practical chapters that precede them. 

Benjamin Brawley. 

Morehouse College, Atlanta, 
October 15, 1918. 



AFRICA AND THE WAR 



AFRICA AND THE WAR 



AFRICA 

A FRICA was the home of the Pharaohs, and 
/v of Cleopatra — the land of the lotus-eaters, 
of caravans, and of pyramids. Neither Asia nor 
Europe can equal the riches or the dreams of 
this loneliest of continents, or rival the pathos 
of its song. It has nourished the Carthaginians, 
the Abyssinians, the Senegalese, and built em- 
pireafter empire. It has also seen such heartless 
exploitation of human beings as the world in all 
its centuries never witnessed before. 

It is difficult for us to conceive of the vastness 
of this continent. It holds over 11,500,000 
square miles. It is nearly four times as large 
as our own United States. We speak of Georgia 
as the largest of our states east of the Missis- 

3 



4 Africa and the War 

sippi. Africa is two hundred times as large as 
Georgia. From Cape Town to Cairo is a dis- 
tance of 5,000 miles, and the farthest points 
east and west are 4,650 miles apart. The lake 
system of Central Africa is equaled only by our 
own Great Lakes, while four great rivers — the 
Nile, the Niger, the Congo, and the Zambezi — 
rival the Mississippi. 

And here is a population of the most diversi- 
fied types. The natives, perhaps 175,000,000 in 
number, extend all the way from the cultivated 
Egyptian or the warlike Zulu to the Central 
African bushman, and from four to seven feet 
in height. In the North are the Algerians and 
Egyptians, people partially of Hamitic or 
Semitic stock, with consequently some infusion 
of Caucasian blood. In the region of the upper 
Nile are the Abyssinians, children of the ancient 
Ethiopians. On the west coast are the Negroes, 
while in the vast region extending for two thou- 
sand miles south of the Soudan are the two 
hundred related Bantu tribes, merging into the 
Hottentot in the far South, or into the Kaffirs 
in the Southeast. Into this enormous popula- 
tion are thrown two million Europeans — Eng- 
Hshmen, Frenchmen, Portuguese, Boers — living 



Africa 5 

generally in the cultivated centers near the 
coast. What might we not expect from this 
medley of races? 

The flora and the fauna are the most wonder- 
ful in the world. Here are the antelope, the 
hippopotamus, the crocodile; the lion, the 
hyena, the giraffe; the ostrich, the python, the 
gorilla. In the North are the olive, the date, 
the fig; in the South the baobab, the banana, 
and cotton; and hundreds of thousands of fertile 
square miles are still virgin soil. 

:!c H< H: ^ He 

When at the end of the Middle Ages the first 
modern explorers went down the coast of Africa 
and began the slave-trade, they by no means 
came to a country altogether savage. The whole 
ciu-rent conception of Africa and the Africans 
can find explanation only in the events of the 
last four hundred years. When the Moham- 
medans came down from the Northwest to the 
western part of the Soudan they found there 
the Negro kingdom of Ghana, which by the 
middle of the eleventh century had a capital 
built of wood and stone, and a king with an army 
of two hundred thousand. Early in the thir- 
teenth century the kingdom of Melle, five hun- 



6 Africa and the War 

dred miles north of the Gulf of Guinea, began to 
supersede the older Ghana; and for a hundred 
years it was the foremost power in this part of 
the world. ''Its greatest king, Mansa Musa, 
made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, with a 
caravan of sixty thousand persons. He took 
eighty camel loads of gold dust (worth about 
five million dollars) to defray his expenses, and 
greatly impressed the people of the East with 
his magnificence.''* Then in the beginning of 
the sixteenth century, in the great bend of the 
Niger, rose the kingdom of Songhay, most ex- 
tensive of all the Negro empires. Askia, its 
greatest ruler, by no means cultivated the splen- 
dor of Mansa Musa, but was rather a student, a 
statesman, and an organizer. During his reign 
he consolidated an empire nearly as large in 
extent as all Europe, he built a strong university, 
and we are told that ''he was obeyed with as 
much docility on the farthest limits of the empire 
as he was in his own palace, and there reigned 
everywhere great plenty and absolute peace." 
Such was the culture that without outside as- 
sistance Africa had developed before the coming 
of the European. 

♦DuBois: The Negro, 52. 



Africa 7 

Then came the slave-trader. Let any one 
who wonders why such kingdoms as those just 
mentioned have not been more permanent in 
their influence remember slavery. The center 
of the trade in the colonial period of American 
history was the coast for about two hundred 
miles east of the Niger River. From this com- 
paratively small region came as many slaves as 
from all the rest of Africa together. Portugal 
led the way. In 1441 Prince Henry sent out one 
Gonzales, who captured three Moors on the 
African coast. These offered as ransom ten 
Negroes whom they had taken. The Negroes 
were brought to Lisbon in 1442, and in 1444 
Prince Henry regularly began the European 
trade from the Guinea Coast. For fifty years 
his country enjoyed a monopoly of the traffic. 
The slaves were taken at first to Europe, and 
later to the Spanish possessions in America, 
where Indian slavery did not work well. Spain 
herself joined in the trade in 1517, and as early 
as 1530 WiUiam Hawkins, a merchant of 
Plymouth, visited the Guinea Coast and took 
away a few slaves. England really entered the 
field, however, with the voyage in 1562 of Cap- 
.tain John Hawkins, son of William, who also 



8 Africa and the War 

went to the west coast. In course of time Eng- 
land came to regard the slave-trade as of such 
importance that when in 1713 she accepted the 
Peace of Utrecht she insisted on having awarded 
to her for thirty-three years the exclusive right 
to transport slaves to the Spanish colonies in 
America. 

Slavery is a thing of the past now in Enghsh 
and American dominions, but even until our 
own day the curse has lingered in Africa, chiefly 
through the work of Mohammedans. Within 
comparatively recent years African slaves have 
been taken away to Arabia and Persia, and one 
might still occasionally come upon the traffic 
in the region of the Congo, or on the cocoa 
plantations of the Portuguese islands on the 
west coast. 

Such is the system that ultimately gave rise 
to two interesting colonies in the West. As early 
as 1787 Sierra Leone was founded by the Eng- 
hsh as a colony for free Negroes, some of whom 
had gained their freedom in consequence of Lord 
Mansfield's decision in 1772, by which any 
slave who touched the soil of England became 
free. Others had been discharged from the 
British army after the American Revolution, 



Africa 9 

and all were leading in England a more or less 
precarious existence. In 1787 about four hun- 
dred were taken to a district purchased from the 
king of Sierra Leone, and five years later twelve 
hundred Negroes who had escaped from the 
United States to Canada were also taken thither. 
England cared with wisdom for the Negroes, 
giving them a daily allowance for the first six 
months, assigning lands to them, and generally 
seeking to bring them under the influence of re- 
ligious education. As early as 1783 it had been 
proposed that such a colony as this should be 
established for free American Negroes; but it 
was not until 1816 that the American Coloniza- 
tion Society was organized, and not until 1822, 
after a treaty with certain native princes had 
been concluded, that active settlement began, 
each man being allotted a tract of thirty acres 
with the means of cultivating it. After a while, 
however, the agents of the society became 
discouraged at the difiiculties that had to be 
overcome and returned to America with a few 
faint-hearted colonists. Others rallied around a 
spirited and determined Negro, Elijah Johnson, 
and remained, enlarging the colony by the pur- 
chase of new tratjts of land. Within recent years 



10 Africa and the War 

Liberia has had a varied history. Hard pressed 
by her powerful neighbors, a few years ago she 
appealed to the United States for aid in her 
business affairs, and in 1909 President Taft ap- 
pointed a special commission to investigate the 
matter. Very recently (1918) the American 
Government has assisted with a new loan of 
$5,000,000. 

Even before Sierra Leone and Liberia were 
founded, however, there had been planted in the 
extreme southern part of Africa a colony that 
represented an entirely different tendency, one 
of Europeans who came not so much as slave- 
traders as to possess the land and to found their 
homes. It was about the middle of the seven- 
teenth century, in 1652, that the Dutch, famous 
seamen of the time, took possession of Cape 
Colony. Many Boers, or Dutch farmers, emi- 
grated to South Africa, being interested espe- 
cially in the raising of cattle. They were joined 
in course of time by a few Huguenots who had 
been driven out of France. All became slave- 
holders. Early in the nineteenth century, in 
1814, England purchased the Cape from Hol- 
land. Twenty years later, in consequence of 
England^s general emancipation act, Parliament 



Africa It 

bought all the Negroes held by the Boers and 
set them free. The Boers had never been happy 
about their transfer of allegiance, and eight 
thousand of them, disgusted with the loss of 
their slaves and the small price received for 
them, left the Cape and pushed northward into 
the wilderness. Crossing the Orange River, they 
founded the Orange Free State. Some, going 
still farther north, crossed the Vaal River, a 
tributary of the Orange, and established the 
Transvaal or South African Republic on what 
was practically a slave-holding foundation. The 
harsh treatment accorded the natives by the 
Boers, the later conflict with England, and the 
sturdy comradery of Englishman and Boer in 
the great war are all matters too familiar for 
present comment. 

Such were the special colonies planted on the 
western or southern coasts. The interior of 
Africa, however, awaited development. The 
modern period of scientific exploration really 
began with James Bruce, whose discoveries 
and adventures, especially in the region of 
Abyssinia and the upper Nile, stimulated the 
founding of the African Association in 1788, 
which organization even before the close 



12 Africa and the War 

of the eighteenth century sent out Ledyard, 
Lucas, Houghton, and Mungo Park to ex- 
plore the Niger basin. The name, however, 
before which all others pale is that of David 
Livingstone. 



n 

DAVID LIVINGSTONE 

WHEN Livingstone began his work of ex- 
ploration in 1849, practically all of Africa 
between the Sahara and the Dutch settlements 
in the extreme South was unknown territory. 
By the time of his death in 1873 he had brought 
this entire region within the view of civilization. 
On his first journey, or series of journeys (1849- 
1856), starting from Cape Town, he made his 
way northward for a thousand miles to Lake 
Ngami; then, pushing on to Linyanti, he un- 
dertook one of the most perilous excursions of 
his entire career, his objective for more than a 
thousand miles being Loanda on the West Coast, 
which point he reached after six months in the 
wilderness. Coming back to Linyanti, he turned 
his face eastward, discovered Victoria Falls on 
the Zambezi, and finally arrived at Quilimane 
on the coast. On his second series of journeys 

13 



14 Africa and the War 

(1858-1864) he explored the Zambezi, the Shire, 
and the Rovuma rivers in the East, and dis- 
covered Lake Nyasa. On his final expedition 
(1866-1873), in hunting for the upper courses 
of the Nile he discovered Lakes Tanganyika, 
Mweru, and Bangweolo, and the Lualaba River. 
His achievement as an explorer was as distinct 
as it was unparalleled. His work as a mis- 
sionary and his worth as a man it is not quite so 
easy to express concretely; but in these capaci- 
ties he was no less distinguished and his accom- 
plishment no less signal. 

There had been missionaries, and great ones, 
in Africa before Livingstone.^ There was the 
Moravian, George Schmidt, who, coming in 
1737, labored for six years among the natives 
in the South until he was forced by the settlers 
to give up his work. Five years after him came 
John Schwalber, who also labored among the 
Hottentots and who died after eight years of 
service. On the East Coast one hundred years 
later there was the great Krapf , and in the South 
Robert Moffat, Livingstone's own father-in-law, 
who labored for fifty-three years, helping to open 
up Bechuanaland for later workers. The differ- 
ence between Livingstone and these consecrated 



David Livingstone 15 

men was not so much in devotion as in the con- 
ception of the task. He himself felt that a 
missionary in the Africa of his day was to be 
more than a mere preacher of the word — that he 
would have also to be a Christian statesman, 
and even a director of exploration and com- 
merce if need be. This was his title to great- 
ness; to him ^Hhe end of the geographical feat 
was only the beginning of the enterprise." 
Knowing, however, that many honest persons 
did not sympathize with him in this concep- 
tion of his mission, after 1856 he declined 
longer to accept salary from the missionary 
society that originally sent him out, working 
afterwards under the patronage of the Brit- 
ish Government and the Royal Geographical 
Society. 

His sympathy and his courtesy were unfail- 
ing, even when he himself was placed in the 
greatest danger. Said Henry Drummond of 
him: '' Wherever David Livingstone's footsteps 
are crossed in Africa the fragrance of his memory 
seems to remain." On one occasion a hunter 
was impaled on the horn of a rhinoceros, and a 
messenger ran eight miles for the physician. 
Although he himself had been wounded for life 



16 Africa and the War 

by a lion and his friends insisted that he should 
not ride at night through a wood infested with 
wild beasts, Livingstone insisted on his Christian 
duty to go, only to find that the man had died 
and to have to retrace his footsteps. Again and 
again his party would have been destroyed by 
some savage chieftain if it had not been for his 
own unbounded tact and courage. To the de- 
voted men who helped him he gave the assur- 
ance that he would die before he would permit 
them to be taken; and after his death at Chi- 
tambo's village Susi and Chuma journeyed for 
nine months and over eight hundred miles of 
dangerous country to take his body to the coast. 
Already Livingstone divined the danger for the 
future of the harsh attitude of the Roman 
CathoHcs toward Protestants; he was unre- 
mitting in his efforts against the slave trade; 
and he could find no justification whatever for 
the treatment of the natives by the Boers. As 
for himself, on one occasion at Kolobeng the 
Boers smashed all the chairs and medicine- 
bottles in the house, and on four wagons took 
away the table, the sofa, and everything else 
that was worth having. Withal, however, he 
was a man of tremendous faith, in his mission, 



David Livingstone 17 

in his country, in humanity, in God. Wrote he 
on one occasion : 



This age presents one great fact in the Providence of 
God; missions are sent forth to all quarters of the world, — 
missions not of one section of the Church, but from all 
sections, and from nearly all Christian nations. It seems 
very unfair to judge of the success of these by the number 
of the conversions that have followed. These are rather 
proofs of the missions being of the right sort. The fact 
which ought to stimulate us above all others is, not that 
we have contributed to the conversion of a few souls, 
however valuable these may be, but that we are diffusing 
a knowledge of Christianity throughout the world. Future 
missionaries will see conversions follow every sermon. We 
prepare the way for them. We work for a glorious future 
which we are not destined to see — the golden age which 
has not been, but will yet be. We are only morning-stars 
shining in the dark, but the glorious morn will break, the 
good time coming yet. For this time we work; may God 
accept our imperfect service. 

Of such quahty was David Livingstone — Mis- 
sionary, Explorer, Philanthropist. ^'For thirty 
years his hfe was spent in an unwearied effort 
to evangehze the native races, to explore the 



18 Africa and the War 

undiscovered secrets, and abolish the desolating 
slave trade of Central Africa." To what extent 
after sixty years have we advanced toward his 
ideals? With what justice are we the inheritors 
of his renown? 



Ill 



Germany's colonies in Africa as the central 
problem of the war 



INTEREST in colonization in Africa was very 
largely an outgrowth of the great industrial 
development of the leading countries of Europe 
in the closing years of the nineteenth century. 
England and France grew apace in mining and 
manufactures, while Germany, under the stimu- 
lus of Bismarck's encouragement of internal 
development after the era of his great military 
successes, became famous both for the variety 
and the intrinsic worth of her products. The 
whole phenomenon was in the form of a circle. 
Invention and commerce stimulated coloniza- 
tion, and distant possessions, with their raw 
materials and their demands for finished prod- 
ucts, in turn gave new impetus to industry in 
the home countries. After the work of Living- 
stone Europe could not long remain unmindful 

19 



20 Africa and the War 

of the vast possibilities of an undeveloped con- 
tinent lying at her very door. 

The new era was signalized by the efforts of 
Leopold II, King of the Belgians. From the be- 
ginning of his reign in 1865 this ruler read with 
interest the unfolding page of African explora- 
tion. On his invitation there assembled in 
Brussels in 1876 a congress which became organ- 
ized as the International Association for the 
Civilization of Central Africa. The design of 
the association was not only for the distinctly 
scientific purpose of exploration, but also pro- 
fessedly for the ending of the slave trade, and 
national committees were formed in the different 
countries represented for the better promotion 
of the work. It was under the auspices of this 
organization, specifically of the Committee for 
the Study of the Upper Congo, that Stanley, 
fresh from a tour of the Great Lakes of Central 
Africa, was in 1879 sent to study the Congo 
region. The distinguished explorer returned 
after five years, bringing maps of a great terri- 
tory of 900,000 square miles. Even before he 
returned, however, because the national com- 
mittees had not rendered very material service, 
Leopold had more and more been obHged to 



Germany^s Colonies in Africa 21 

finance the expedition alone. To recover what 
he had spent he began to develop the Congo 
territory commercially. In 1884, after about 
forty stations had been founded and steamers 
had regularly begun to ply up and down the 
river, the Committee for the Study of the Upper 
Congo, that is to say, the International Asso- 
ciation, changed its name to the International 
Association of the Congo, which organization 
received recognition at the hands of the United 
States. Complications now arose. Portugal in- 
sisted on a claim to the mouth of the river and 
sought the aid of Great Britain. Leopold made 
kindly overtures to France, and Bismarck also 
opposed Portugal by way of opposing England. 
The proposed treaty between Portugal and Eng- 
land was not ratified. England having been 
thwarted for the moment, Germany was now 
ready to recognize the Congo State, and issued 
invitations to a congress at Berlin. Whatever 
the motive for its calling, this conference was 
really needed. German traders had already set- 
tled far down on the west coast, French and 
Portuguese claims were conflicting, and in gen- 
eral there were dangers of serious complications. 
. The famous congress met in Berhn, Novem- 



22 Africa and the War 

ber 15, 1884. It not only recognized the vast 
domain of the International Association of the 
Congo, but laid down the principle that if any 
power contemplated the estabhshment of a pro- 
tectorate in any section it would have to notify 
all the other powers before doing so. Leopold 
promised not only to allow freedom of com- 
merce in the region under his protection, but 
also to improve the condition of the natives who 
had already begun to suffer under his system. 
It was not long, however, before he began to 
betray his trust. Nevertheless the congress re- 
mains noteworthy as an effort on the part of 
the great powers of Europe to consider with 
candor and with open minds their colonial 
claims and differences. 

It was in 1878 that a German branch of the 
International Association was founded. Already 
for some years German missionaries had labored 
in the Southwest, and now the Southern Congo 
and the eastern region near Zanzibar were ex- 
plored. In 1884 Bismarck declared the land 
along the coast from Angola to Cape Colony 
under German protection, and thus German 
Southwest Africa appeared on the map. In the 
same year, after dealings with native chiefs. 



Germany's Colonies in Africa 23 

Germany also declared a protectorate over To- 
goland, a little kingdom on the Gulf of Guinea, 
and over Kamerun, a much larger territory- 
farther east of the Gulf. German East Africa 
also now assumed definite shape. This was the 
result of the efforts of the German East African 
Company. In 1888 there was a stern revolt of 
the Arabs working in the section, one which the 
company was not strong enough to handle. 
Berlin accordingly sent an Imperial Commis- 
sioner to take charge. Bismarck, now thor- 
oughly interested in colonization, more and 
more offended England by his aggressive meth- 
ods. After he fell from power in 1890, his suc- 
cessor. Count Caprivi, endeavored to come to 
an understanding with Great Britain. The re- 
sult was a settlement in the same year by which 
the boundaries of Kamerun became fixed, Ger- 
man East Africa was extended to the Belgian 
Congo, a narrow strip of land reaching from the 
northeast end of German Southwest Africa to 
the Zambezi River was definitely secured, and 
the Island of Heligoland in the North Sea was 
given to Germany by England. In return Great 
Britain received full power over Zanzibar and 
a clear title to British East Africa. The settle- 



24 Africa and the War 

ment satisfied nobody. English critics were 
specially bitter in view of the fact that the large 
section known as German East Africa lay 
directly in the way of the proposed Cape-to- 
Cairo railroad. Germany, on the other hand, 
in spite of the large concessions granted to her, 
still felt that too much had been yielded. Ger- 
man East Africa, however, now entered upon a 
highly prosperous career. In German South- 
west Africa the story was entirely different. 
Formidable conflicts with the native Hottentots 
and later with the Herreros in the North per- 
sistently attracted attention away from the in- 
dustries of peace and really gave rise to many 
problems of the present day. 

It is worth while to review what in the mean- 
time had been done in African colonization by 
the foremost powers, England and France. Per- 
haps the most noteworthy advance in African 
history of the last fifty years has been that of 
the EngHsh in South Africa. By the time of 
the treaty with Germany in 1890 Great Britain 
had not only extended her boundaries over 
Bechuanaland and Zululand and begun to ex- 
tend her influence in Hhodesia; she had gained 
the vast tract of Nigeria in the west, had estab- 



Germany^ s Colonies in Africa 25 

lished a protectorate over British Somaliland in 
the northeast, as well as gained a firm foothold 
in Egypt. France in the meantime had ex- 
tended her colonial boundaries until she had in 
her sphere of influence the whole of Northwest 
Africa from Tunis to the Congo and from 
Senegal to Lake Chad. By 1896 she had also 
definitely captured and subdued the island of 
Madagascar. 

All of these enormous concessions were for 
the time being made seciu-e by a series of vital 
treaties. We have already remarked the agree- 
ment between England and Germany in 1890. 
An agreement between England and France a 
Httle later in the same year definitely sealed the 
English claim to Nigeria and the French claim 
to Madagascar. By a Franco-German agree- 
ment of 1894 the vague boundaries of the differ- 
ent protectorates of the Soudan region were 
definitely fixed and France so extended her in- 
fluence to the east and south of Kamerun as to 
connect her vast section in the Soudan with 
that on the west coast. A final Anglo-French 
agreement of 1899 forced upon France the recog- 
nition of English claims to the region of the 
upper Nile, the British position being made 



26 Africa and the War 

strong by reason of Kitchener's success in sup- 
pressing revolt. In return, however, for French 
recognition of her claims upon the Egyptian 
Soudan, England formally gave her approval 
to the vast region claimed for France by the 
Franco-German treaty of 1894. 

This brief account has omitted mention of the 
Portuguese dominions of Angola and Portuguese 
East Africa, the Italian possessions in the North 
and on the east coast, and such a great self- 
governing country as Abyssinia. Enough has 
been said, however, to remind us that the great 
rivals in Central Africa have been England, 
France, and Germany. At the time of the out- 
break of the war, of the 11,500,000 square miles 
on the continent of Africa France was in control 
of 4,400,000 square miles. Great Britain 3,700,- 
000, Germany 931,000, Belgium 909,000, Portu- 
gal 794,000, and Spain 593,000. While France 
possessed the greatest number of square miles, 
her dominions included the Desert of Sahara; 
Great Britain was really in possession of the 
most promising tracts. Germany's possessions 
embraced one-twelfth of the continental area, 
and one-twelfth of a population rapidly ap- 
proaching 200,000,000. From the strategically 



Germany^ s Colonies in Africa 27 

placed German Southwest Africa, German East 
Africa, and Kamerun as firm bases, however, 
shfe aimed ultimately at a vast Central African 
Empire that would not only hold securely the 
great tract of the Belgian Congo, but dominate 
even Egypt and South Africa, while in the far 
northwest she would finally wrest Morocco from 
France. In other words, she dreamed of ruling 
four-sevenths of both the territory and the 
people of Africa. We might make this clearer 
by saying that, aside from her vision of dominat- 
ing Central Europe, South America, AustraHa, 
and all of Asia except some unimportant tracts, 
in Africa alone Germany dreamed of possessing 
an empire that in extent would roughly compare 
with our own United States (exclusive of Alaska 
and the islands) in the ratio of 7 to 3. And let 
there be no doubt that this vast territory Ger- 
many was determined to have; it was absolutely 
necessary to have such a source for raw mate- 
rials. Dr. Paul Leutwein, son of a former Gov- 
ernor of Southwest Africa, has said,* "If Cen- 
tral Europe comes to nothing, then we shall 
indeed have Central Africa. Central Europe, on 

* For the two quotations we are indebted to the editor of 
the National Geographic Magazine, June, 1918, p. 565. 



28 Africa and the War 

the other hand, without Central Africa, can not 
be contemplated for a moment;'' and the official 
publication issued by the German commander 
at Lodz on the occasion of the Emperor's birth- 
day, January 27, 1915, said: "A victorious war 
would give us the Belgian Congo, the French 
Congo, and, if Portugal continues to translate 
her hostile intentions toward us into actions, 
would also give us the Portuguese colonies on the 
east and west coasts of Africa. We should then 
have a colonial empire of which our fathers 
could never have dreamed." 

We can now see how supremely significant 
was the taking of German East Africa and 
Southwest Africa in the present war. It meant 
nothing less than the shattering of Germany's 
vastest dream, one greater even than that of 
Mittel-Europa, and the seizure of a territory 
five hundred times as important as continental 
Belgium. 



T 



IV 

SPECIAL PEOBLEMS AND DIFFICULTIES 

'HE proper disposition of the German col- 
onies, however, only opens up the whole 
tremendous problem that faces the statesmen 
who must determine the lines for the future de- 
velopment of Africa. Thirty-five years after 
the Berlin Congress the vast continent is thrown 
back upon the wisdom, the foresight, and the 
magnanimity of the civilized world; and upon 
the decision of mankind rests the destiny of 
millions of human beings yet unborn. 

Let it be borne in mind that Africa offers not 
/ one but many problems. Social, economic, and 
religious questions are interwoven in bewilder- 
ing array. Any attempt at solution, moreover, 
is complicated by the conception of the African 
that somehow obtains throughout Christendom 
and that is nothing more than a heritage from 
four hundred years of the enslavement of black 
men. Let one speak of the native African and 

29 



30 Africa and the War 

there rises all too frequently before the mind of 
the listener a picture of an untutored cannibal, 
savage and degraded. Of course such individu- 
als are still to be found, and, in a country of 
such vast' extent, found by the thousands. Such 
a conception, however, does no justice at all to 
the iron-workers and weavers of the South and 
West, to the aspiring Zulus, or to the African 
boy who, trained in a mission school, was able 
to act as interpreter for two Europeans who 
could not otherwise understand each other. We 
have to remember that in increasing numbers 
native Africans have had the benefit of Euro- 
pean culture, and that those who are educated 
have begun to pass their ideals on to their less 
fortunate brothers. In other words, in all our 
planning for the new day in which Africa is no 
longer to be the Dark Continent, we must re- 
member that we are planning not so much for 
Africans as for human beings, and that, while 
these people are largely backward, they still 
are entitled to the Uberty and democracy of 
which we have heard so much and for the acid 
tests of which WB musi> help to prepare them. 

With this proviso we have then to face the 
peculiar dif&culfci^ in the situation. Those that 



Special Problems and Difficulties 81 

are social strike us at once. Here are, in a 
rough estimate, as many as two hundred lan- 
guages and dialects to be considered in any- 
large plan for the internationalizing of the con- 
tinent. Moreover, many of these people, in 
spite of great devotion to family ties, are still 
living under a system that countenances polyg- 
amy. Here is a problem that calls for the utmost 
patience and tact. A chief, for instance, who 
might become converted to Christianity, natu- 
rally has some debate over the question of 
whether he is just in putting away all but one 
of his wives, especially when the women them- 
selves, bound by custom, are frequently the 
strongest adherents of the system. Close to po- 
lyg-amy, of course, are various related vices, many 
of which are definitely encouraged by paganism. 
It is in the sphere of religion, in fact, that 
many of the greatest difficulties are focused. 
The problem is now fourfold. First there is the 
conflict between Christianity and pure African 
paganism and superstition. This, however, soon 
merges into the sterner conflict between Chris- 
tianity and Mohammedanism. Great work is to 
be done here, for, as Prof. W. S. Naylor has said, 
"Islam has enough truth to palliate an easy- 



32 Africa and the War 

going conscience and enough error to satisfy a 
corrupt heart." Moreover, a Mohammedan 
who passes over to another reUgion becomes 
practically ostracized by his former friends. In 
the third place there is division between the two 
great branches of Christianity, Catholic and 
Protestant, which in Africa as elsewhere have 
all too frequently faced each other as uncom- 
promising foes. Finally, there is the Ethiopian 
Church Movement with the motto, '^ Africa for 
the Africans.'' Somewhat like the African 
Methodist Episcopal Church in the United 
States before the Civil War, this organization, 
primarily religious, because it furnishes the best 
opportunity for assembling has become en- 
larged into that one which best encourages racial 
ideals and native aspiration. 

It will be observed that every one of these 
religious problems has been forced upon the 
native from the outside and by people who re- 
garded themselves as more fortunate than he. 
But this is not all. As Christians have ad- 
vanced in Africa — especially Boers and Enghsh- 
men and Germans — they have made it more 
and more difficult for the native African to have 
genuine economic opportunity. The personal 



Special Problems and Difficulties S3 

indignities and proscription and segregation 
imposed upon the natives surpass even the leg- 
islation of Southern states of the United States, 
and the latest land act seems designed to dis- 
possess them almost entirely. Nothing what- 
ever, however, has served to keep the unscrupu- 
lous trader from preying upon the native. Chief 
assistant of the whole iniquitous system of 
slavery was rum. Even within recent years the 
Christian nations of the West have annually 
sent along with their missionaries ten million 
gallons of liquor to aid in the civilizing of 
Africa. It was some years ago that Molique, 
King of Nupe, writing to Bishop Crowther, gave 
the following indictment of Christianity: ''Ba- 
rasa (rum or gin) has ruined our country. It 
has ruined our people very much. It has made 
our people mad. I agree to everything for trade 
except barasa. We beg Crowther, the great 
Christian minister, to beg the great priests to 
beg the English queen to prevent bringing barasa 
into this land. For God's sake he must help 
us in this matter. He must not leave us to be- 
come spoiled."* 

* Quoted by W. S. Naylor in Daybreak in the Dark Continent, 
p. 127, from Jesse Page: Samuel Crowther. 



^ 



84 Africa and the War 

Such are simply some of the more outstanding 
problems that have to be faced. On every hand 
arise delicate questions of local adjustment. In 
every case also the native is the chief factor to 
be considered, and the Ethiopian Movement 
can hardly be over-emphasized. India, like 
Egypt, has for years been restless under a for- 
eign yoke, and it was the deed of a young 
Serbian that actually started the world confla- 
gration. Africa, too, has her young idealistic 
class. An outstanding leader in the insurrec- 
tion in German Southwest Africa in 1903 was 
Henry Witboi, a convert of the Ehenish Mis- 
sionary Society, who felt that the time had come 
for the deHverance of his people from the con- 
trol of white men. As Wendell Phillips re- 
minded us years ago, such a spirit in a white 
man the World has been taught ±o call diplo- 
macy, while in a black man it is called hypocrisy. 
While the world is getting straight, however, 
we may as well face it frankly. If generously 
handled, it may be turned to great account; but 
if the treatment is otherwise, untold strife is 
stored up for the futiu'e. 



THE MEANING FOR AMERICA 

A FRICA, then, is the great prize of the war. 
Ix A vast continent, the second on the globe, 
and the last to yield to the influences of civili- 
zation, is now to be developed as never before. 
When the aUied countries of Europe with the 
aid of America finally dictate terms at the 
council-board, it will be to Africa that they will 
primarily look for the raw material on which to 
base the rehabilitation of their empires. When 
that time comes they will haye to remember 
the part played by the native African in the 
struggle for the salvation of the world. The 
disposition of 'this continent then becomes the 
greatest economic and political question to arise 
out of the present war and even in the twentieth 
century. 

The problem becomes concrete by reason of 

the possession by the AUies of the German col- 

35 



36 Africa and the War 

onies in Africa. Everything looks toward some 
sort of international commission for the conti- 
nent, and the discussion will, of course, be of 
supreme importance in the war settlement. The 
British Prime Minister said last winter that at 
present the German colonies are ''held at the 
disposal of a conference whose decision must 
have primary regard to the wishes and interests 
of the native inhabitants of such colonies. '^ A 
little later President Wilson spoke of ''a free, 
open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjust- 
ment of all colonial claims based upon a strict 
observance of the principle that in determining 
all such questions of sovereignty the interests of 
the populations concerned must have equal 
weight with the equitable claims of the Govern- 
ment whose title is to be determined." Natu- 
rally, the franker acknowledgment of native 
African aspiration by the Prime Minister has 
met with more cordial response in the native 
press than the more conservative statement of 
our own President. Both utterances, however, 
look to the future adjustment of the question. 

Any disposition whatsoever of course takes it 
as understood that Africa is not longer to re- 
main in savagery and isolation, After th^ wm 



The Meaning for America 37 

the advance of science will demand the highest 
development of all the land on the globe, and 
the most luxuriant of all is not likely to be 
passed by. Before we consider further an inter- 
national commission, however, it might be safe 
to remark one or two other solutions which have 
in one way or another been seriously proposed. 
One of these involves a practical reversion to 
the status existent before the war. This may 
be dismissed at once. The Allies will never con- 
sent to Germany's holding a corner-stone for the 
upbuilding of her dreamed-of African empire. 
When efforts are being made to curtail her eco- 
nomic advance it is not at all likely that she 
will be permitted to retain her great source of 
raw materials.* And this is just, for it is of 
course on an economic foundation that Germany 
has built her mad political visions and thus en- 
dangered the world. Again, the cry of Africa 
for the Africans has been raised. Just now, 

* While these pages were being made ready for the press, 
Mr. Balfour, British foreign secretary, in a noteworthy ad- 
dress before representatives of Australia and New Zealand, 
October 23, 1918, declared that under no circumstances would 
it be consistent with the safety, security, and unity of the 
British Empire that Germany's colonies should be returned 
to her. 



88 Africa and the War 

because this is in large measure the outgrowth 
of manly racial aspiration, it calls for tact and 
delicate handling. It must long remain a dream7 
however. Theoretically it is a grave question if 
the nations of Christendom would really be 
doing their duty if in the present state of world 
civilization they left this great continent to the 
natives who have neither the education nor the 
organization necessary for the momentous prob- 
lems of democratic government. There are of 
course hundreds and even thousands of Africans 
who are educated or who are rapidly being edu- 
cated; but there are also vast regions in which 
savagery still obtains, and if we take the popu- 
lation as a whole we find it altogether unready to 
wrestle with questions of the best form of gov- 
ernment for themselves and their children's 
children. Even if such a settlement were theo- 
retically sound, it is at present impracticable. 
After all they have won in this great continent 
and after all they have suffered in the war, it 
is not likely that England and France will vol- 
untarily withdraw from Africa at any time in 
the near future or suffer such a disposition of 
the German colonies as would endanger them- 
selves; nor will the United States expect them 



The Meaning for America 39 

to do so. Some generations hence the world 
may not unreasonably welcome into the family 
of na^tions some great self-governing Negro or 
Bantu states in Central Africa; but such a con- 
summation could come only after education had 
had the freest possible play with the great mass 
of the population. If then Germany's colonies 
are not to be given back to her and if they are 
not at once to be self-governing, we come back 
to the idea of an international commission. 

In this disposition by international tribunal 
we can not too much emphasize the need of 
careful planning for the future development of 
the natives of the continent. Too long has 
Africa been the prey of the powers. The hor- 
rors of two hundred and fifty years of the slave- 
trade are still to be recalled. Mutilated men 
and women are still to be seen in the Belgian 
Congo; and in South Africa, by Englishman 
and Boer alike, the native is daily subjected to 
the most grievous indignities prompted by race 
prejudice. It would be the crime of the ages if, 
after fighting the greatest war in history for the 
freedom of all people, and in the face of the 
supreme appeal to their chivalry, the foremost 
nations of the world should make of this sad 



^ 



Jfl Africa and the War 

continent, so wonderful in its possibilities, the 
latest field for selfishness, exploitation and 
racial animosity. They must not do so. They 
will not. 

We may then reasonably expect some form 
of an international protectorate over the Ger- 
man colonies. If, however, the Allies work to- 
gether in the development of some colonies, they 
must necessarily work together more efficiently 
for the development of all colonies. In other 
words, England and France, the chief possessors, 
and America, whose aid really decided the war, 
will find themselves working together in coloni- 
zation, missions, and education on a scale never 
before contemplated, for in the interest of 
economy all effort will be co-ordinated as much 
as possible. Aims will be similar, and the ex- 
perience of one nation will help another. As a 
field for the working of the principle of inter- 
nationalism the opportunity now afforded in 
Africa is unprecedented. 

Again the native. What is it that the African 
needs more than anything else just now? 
Education, Christian education — the education 
given by missionaries, but also something 
l)rQader than that, something that will not only 



The Meaning for America 41 

be thoroughly Christian but so adapted as to 
make the African an intelhgent citizen in his 
commonwealth, trained in mechanics, farming, 
engineering, or even in the professions, especially 
medicine, as the case might require. Let the 
native but catch a vision of his possibilities and 
he will work with enthusiasm. But the era is 
not one for those who are futilely educated or 
who look for easy jobs. Africa has seen too many 
men of that sort already. What she now needs 
supremely is men who can apply what they 
know. 

But who is actually to do the worid* Strange 
are the workings of history. It so happens that 
America, the United States, that has no land at 
all in Africa, nevertheless has the workers so 
badly needed by her allies. With so much to 
be done at home, England and France will after 
the war find it extremely difficult to spare men 
for colonial service. Moreover, in spite of the 
merits of these powers in colonization, their 
men are hardly so well adapted for the task in 
hand as those who could bring to their work of 
teaching or farming or bridge-building the in- 
spiring contact of closer racial interest. The 
American Negro, then, so long proscribed, sud- 



4^ Africa and the War 

^denly looms up as one of the nation's most im- 
portant assets. His record as a fighting-man is 
well known. Within the last three years he 
has very largely had to fill the gap made in 
industrial pursuits in the North by the sudden 
ceasing of immigration. To him now also Africa 
calls, calls for workers riot by the scores, not by 
the hundreds, but by the thousands and tens 
of thousands. The demand is without parallel, 
the opportunity for the race impressive, and the 
duty resting upon England ' and America to 
train and marshal the workers absolutely im- 
perative. 

This leads us to inquire as to just what it is 
that is needed and just what are the facilities 
for the training of young men and wqmen of 
the Negro race for a program of service of such 
magnitude. We need for this work teachers or 
directors who have had the most thorough, the 
most severe, the most exact training possible, 
and who are able to bring to their task the 
necessary philosophical outlook. We recall 
Bacon's distinction between truly learned men 
and those who are simply expert (that is, experi- 
enced in the mechanics of a given craft) : *' Ex- 
pert men can execute, and perhaps judge of 



The Meaning for America 4S 

particulars, one by one; but the general coun- 
sels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, 
come best from those that are learned." This 
distinction needs to be made now. Not every- 
body who might apply could be used. Initia- 
tive, poise, resourcefulness, reliability, teaching 
ability, good health, and Christian spirit all 
become important assets. Possessing these, the 
worker must also be acquainted with his trade or 
profession from every angle. Only teachers, en- 
gineers, or physicians with such thorough train- 
ing could do the work required. 

Obviously efficient workers according to this 
standard could be found only among college 
graduates or those who have an equivalent of 
college work in normal or technical training. As 
we look over the schools in the South we find 
these sadly lacking in facilities for the 'work in 
hand. Too strong a line exists between the rep- 
resentative colleges and the industrial schools, 
when the task now imposed would call for a 
combinatioij of the best features of both sys- 
tems. No one of the colleges is adequately 
endowed even for its task with its American 
constituency, to say nothing of a great new de- 
mand; while the industrial schools are from 



44 Africa and the War 

five to seven years below the standard. How, 
for instance, would a graduate from one of them 
compare with the graduate in electricity or 
engineering or chemistry from the Massachu- 
setts Institute of Technology? And yet, for the 
work now to be done we need the standard of 
this institution. 

The necessary agency might be found in one 
central training school, or in two or three of the 
best colleges so equipped in special departments 
as to give free play for the best technological 
features, or two or three of the industrial 
schools raised to the standard of the best col- 
leges. In general, the present college student 
would in most cases have to make his training 
more thorough and learn to apply it better, 
while the inaustrial student would certainly 
have to lay a broader foundation in general 
culture. 

It will be observed that we have not consid- 
ered the matter simply from the missionary 
standpoint. ^In no case could this be ignored, 
but in its last analysis the problem is one not 
only in missions but also in world politics and 
general education. 



The Meaning for America ^5 

These were God's chosen people. Never did 
a nation wrong them but that the judgment of 
the Lord overtook it. England trafficked in 
them and lost the richest of her dominions. 
America enslaved them and bled through four 
years of civil war. The Boers oppressed them 
and lost their independence. Belgium muti- 
lated them and witnessed her fields made deso- 
late. Germany harassed them and the hour of 
her destiny struck twelve. Just because they 
are poor and untutored and unorganized, let us 
take warning for the future. ''Woe unto the 
world because of offenses, for it must needs be 
that offenses come; but woe to tl\at man by 
whom the offense cometh!" 



SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTERS 



THE FREEDOM OF THE FREE 

WHEN the people of Jehovah to the Prom- 
ised Land would go, 
They were given a valiant leader for the con- 
flict with the foe; 
But they wandered many weary years and 

faced the raging sea, 
Ere their children won the harvest of the 
Freedom of the Free. 



When the black men of the wilderness were 
wanted of the Lord, 

From America to Europe flashed the word with 
one accord; 

And the Christian nations hankered for the 
glitter of the gain. 

And the screaming of the eagle dulled the clank- 
ing of the chain. 

49 



50 Africa and the War 

But the captive on the slaver's deck beneath 

the lightning's flash — 
Unto him were only scourging and the stinging 

of the lash; 
But such things as these must be, they say, 

and such the pruning be, 
Ere our children win the harvest of the Freedom 

of the Free. 

Far across the deep Atlantic speeds the vessel 

on its way. 
And the nights are wild with weeping and the 

days with tempests gray. 
Till at length within the glory of the dawn 

the shore appears. 
And the slave takes up the battle and the 

burden of the years. 

In the fury of the auction runs the clamor on 

and on: 
"Going! Going! Who bids higher? Going! 

Going! Going! Gone!" 
And the mocking-bird is singing, and the hlies 

dance in glee. 
And the slave alone is sighing for the Freedom 

of the Free. 



The Freedom of the Free 51 

Now the wide plantation shimmers in the fresh- 
ness of the morn, 

And the dusky workers scatter in the cotton 
and the corn, 

With the problem of the ages in the yearning 
of their €yes. 

While the slave whip sings forever underneath 
the azure skies. 

In the silence of the night and from the weird 

assembled throng 
Comes the beauty and the wailing of the dirge 

and Sorrow Song: 
"IVe been listenin^ all the night long for to 

hear some sinner pray; 
I've been waitin' all the night long for the 

breakin' of the day." 

Till at length from Maine to Mexico peals out 

the trumpet blast, 
And a wild expectant nation at the fury stands 

aghast; 
While the young men in their glory feel the 

fever of the fight. 
And the blood drops of the firstborn stain the 

doorposts in the night. 



S2 Africa and the War 

In the crimson of the carnage, in the deluge of 
the flame, 

Come the black men to the trenches for the 
honor and the name; 

And they sell their life-blood dearly for Human- 
ity's decree 

That their sons should have the fullness of the 
Freedom of the Free. 

Now a nation's second birthday blossoms from 

the gloom of night, 
And a people stands bewildered at the dawning 

of the light; 
But the untried hands are willing, and the 

hearts are ever true 
To the call of home and country and the faith 

the fathers knew. 

But the tempter whispers ever with monotonous 

refrain 
That the struggle and the striving and the 

faith are all in vain; 
But from woodland, sea, and mountain peak 

th' eternal years reply: 
''Better strive and fight like brave men than 

like cowards yield and die." 



The Freedom of the Free 58 

Let us heed no tale of Anak or Philistine in 

the land; 
Let us hear the word from Sinai and Jehovah ^s 

high command; 
Worship not the Golden Calf nor unto Baal 

bend the knee, 
That our sons may rise triumphant in the 

Freedom of the Free. 



II \ 

i 

^ i 

WYCLIFFE AND THE WORLD WAR i 

\ 

IT is now six hundred years since John \ 

WycHffe was born. The exact centenary ■■, 

will occur in 1920, or perhaps as much as four j 

years later — nobody knows when. What we j 

do know, however, is that this man seems to ] 

have held within himself the key to every \ 

great thought or noble impulse that has moved j 

the world in modern times, and that to-day we j 

are more than ever working toward the realiza- ] 

tion of his dreams. i 

Few great figures stand out on the page of ] 

history in such absolute loneHness. His early \ 

years are a blank, and the student of his life j 

is impressed by a strange absence of family I 

connections. We know that he spent his best \ 

years in the tradition of Oxford and that he i 

became incomparably skilled in dialectic. He i 
was Master of Balliol, formed for a season a 

54 . 1 



Wycliffe and the World War 55 

political alliance with John of Gaunt, and had 
some large part in the translation of the Bible 
that bears his name; but of the man himself 
we know almost nothing. Of personal interests 
he seems to have had almost none. He wrote 
thousands and thousands of pages, but always 
objectively — about the Papacy, the relations of 
Chiu-ch and State, the Eucharist, but never 
about himself. His friends, those that he had, 
were bound to him primarily by an intellectual 
kinship. Ever was he the seer — the teacher, 
aloof from those he instructed. His very theory 
of liberty is more like the philosophical ideal of 
the French than the emotional impulse for 
freedom in America. Nevertheless he still re- 
mains the greatest exponent of liberty in the 
history of England; and the superlative is used 
advisedly. 

He was ahead of his age and yet intensely 
of it. Professor Kittredge has reminded us* 
of the peculiar ^'modernness'' of the time into 
which he was thrown. The mature years of the 
reformer were cast in a period remarkable even 
in the history of England for the far-reaching 
effect of its events. Into the decade between 

* Chaucer and his Poetry, 1-5. 



56 Africa and the War 

1375 and 1385 fell the work of the "Good 
Parliament/^ noteworthy for its original use of 
the power of impeachment; the death of the 
Black Prince, with all the politics attending 
that event; the Great Schism in the Papacy; 
the Peasants' Revolt ; Wycliffe's three trials and 
his translation of the Bible. Almost every great 
social question that agitates us to-day was 
under discussion in 1382. It was an age of 
intense activity, of labor troubles, of change in 
the art of war, of radicalism in religion, of im- 
perialism in Church and State, and even of 
'trouble in the Balkans." We cite just one 
instance of the liberalism of the period, the 
spirit of Oxford that did so much to make 
Wycliffe's resistance possible. When the re- 
former had incurred the disfavor of Gregory 
XI, the University was enjoined "for the future 
not to permit to be asserted or proposed to any 
extent whatever, the opinions, conclusions, and 
propositions which are at variance with good 
morals and faith," and to have "the said 
John" arrested and sent to the Archbishop of 
Canterbury or to the Bishop of London. The 
congregation, however, voted that it was illegal 
to arrest an English subject on the authority 



Wycliffe and the World War 57 

of a papal bull, ''since that would be giving 
the Pope lordship and regal power in England." 
Such an attitude was not altogether new, of 
course, nor was Wycliffe himself an unheralded 
phenomenon. Even his opposition to the ortho- 
dox position on transubstantiation had been 
anticipated, if not in England, on the continent 
at least, by Berengar of Tours as early as the 
middle of the eleventh century. His general 
questioning attitude, however, toward the func- 
tion of the Papacy, his opposition to the ex- 
emption of ecclesiastical persons from lay con- 
trol, and his insistence on the injury done to 
the clergy by its great wealth and by the abuse 
of the power of excommunication for political 
reasons, are to be accounted for only by the 
character and genius of the English people. 
From the reign of William I to that of Richard 
II history shows a series of contests or opinions 
that not only accounted for the parson of Lut- 
terworth, but that are so interwoven that it is 
difficult to say where the influence of one ends 
and that of another begins. Outstanding as a 
forerunner of course was Grosseteste, who even 
in the thirteenth century was able to summon 
the great heart of England in his opposition to 



68 Africa and the War 

the "dispensations, provisions, and collations" 
of the Papacy; but Grosseteste was followed by 
Occam and Fitzralph and Bradwardine. 

Even with such a tradition as this, however, 
what was it that impelled Wycliffe to take the 
advanced position he did? What was it that 
led him to risk not only his standing but his 
life, and not only his life but his final appeal to 
history, on the issues of liberty and democracy? 
Nothing less than his unbounded faith in hu- 
manity. The root of the social question in his 
day was of course the economic problem; and 
this went back to the position of the Church, 
the greatest landholder in the world. First of 
all the Church had moved under the fine inspi- 
ration of a new faith. There was struggle; there 
was suffering. After three hundred years of 
the Christian era, however, such were its or- 
ganization and its universality of appeal that 
it ceased to be on the defensive and became the 
state religion. Three centuries more, and we 
witness it full blown as a great political institu- 
tion. It dominated council-boards and kings. 
It grew rich. Men and women came into the 
fold, bringing their worldly possessions with 
them. Sometimes scores of slaves, or hundreds, 



Wycliffe and the World War 69 

would be given or won with a great estate. 
What then did the Church become, in France, 
in England, but the greatest of feudal lords? 
And all the while of course it was exempt from 
taxation. What chance had the small farmer 
against such a competitor? 

Side by side with the Church developed the 
aristocratic institution of chivalry. Knights 
went on the Crusades; and the Church, Feudal- 
ism, and Chivalry became indissolubly linked 
in the domination respectively of the religious, 
the economic, and the social life of the Western 
world. Never was an ideal more limited than 
that of chivalry. The knight might fight val- 
iantly to win the rewards of courtly love; but 
for the worker in the fields he cared not at 
all. Ladyhood meant everything to him, wom- 
anhood little or nothing; and such were the 
ideals that dominated England for hundreds of 
years. 

All of this Wycliffe saw. The hypocrisy, the 
hoUowness, of it all, none knew better than he. 
He saw the Church dole out its pittance of 
charity to the hundreds of its poor when it 
really made paupers by the thousands. He 
knew that, wittingly or unwittingly, it was 



60 Africa and the War 

making for the degradation of the individual, 
and he knew, too, that no great landholding, 
slave-driving institution could be truly repre- 
sentative of the Christ. Unless the very theory 
of the divine right of the Pope could be under- 
mined, he saw no hope for the slave. The images 
in the church, the candlesticks, the pilgrimages 
to the tombs of saints — all these things came to 
savor of idolatry to him. He might not have 
been the real inspirer of the rude rhymes of 
John Ball, but he certainly sympathized with 
them. How can we wonder that he recoiled at 
the idea that any drunken priest could by a word 
manufacture the body of Christ? 

At any rate, he set himself against all the 
tradition of his age. When he formulated his 
theory of Church and State, the religious dig- 
nitaries frowned. When he molded his ideas for 
the reforming of the Church itself, the Pope 
commanded that he be silenced. When he 
moved still further to an attack on dogma, 
even the common people considered him blas- 
phemous, though they then understood him 
least of all. He was willing to suffer, however, 
even when those whom he sought to help 
could not understand him — and this not sim- 



Wycliffe and the World War 61 

ply on the narrow basis of patriotism, for 
he was soon at war with Urban VI as well as 
Clement VII. 

Something of all that was wrong in the world 
the great Dante had seen and felt a hundred 
years before. In Wycliffe's own day Gower 
wrote his ''Vox Clamantis," Langland cried in 
the wilderness, and Chaucer realized that the 
times were out of joint. Chaucer, however, 
refused to wear his heart on his sleeve, shrugged 
his shoulders, and laughed himself into the 
second class of poets. But ever since the four- 
teenth century the question has been revived: 
Do we really believe in democracy, in the full 
freedom of all men and women, and are we 
willing to act on oiu* belief? 

The question was a vital one throughout the 
nineteenth century. Macaulay placed himself 
squarely on the side of the people, and Carlyle 
as sturdily represented the opposition. Garrison 
and Phillips and Sumner beHeved in the possi- 
bilities of the slave even before he had learned 
to believe in himself; and into the Civil War 
fell the great issue of democracy like that of 
free labor, free speech, and every other great 
question of politics or society. Professor W. E. 



J 



62 Africa and the War 



Dodd has recently shown us* how the social 
philosophy of the old South gradually crystal- 
Hzed into that of an aristocracy that had to be ^ 
defended at all costs, by churchmen and states- 
men alike. In such a society Walter Scott natu- 
rally became the most popular author, for he 
best portrayed the snobbery that masqueraded 
linder the name of chivalry. The whole system 
was built on one great fallacy, the denial of the 
freedom of the human soul. Not all men were 
to rule or vote, but only those owning property. 
Not all were to be educated at the public ex- 
pense, while ''hard labor was for those whose 
hands were hard.'' Thus was developed in the 
nineteenth century in the greatest republic in 
the world a feudalism that was from the stand- 
point of the serf quite as hopeless as that of the 
Middle Ages. Naturally it left a long train of 
abuses; but worst of all were the prejudices 
and fallacies that it left in men's minds. Even 
to-day some politicians and writers bewail the 
so-called grave error that forced Negro suffrage 
on the South, when there was no other logical 
course out of the dilemma. Ignorance and lack 
of culture might be temporary; a few years of 

* American Journal of Sociology, May, 1918. 



Wydiffe and the World War 63 

training could remedy them: but the principles 
on which the American republic was founded 
were to be eternal. This Sumner saw, and this 
Wycliffe would have seen had he been living in 
1865. 

By the end of the Civil War, however, other 
grave social questions had already forced them- 
selves on the attention of the American people.^ 
The great stream of European immigration had 
set in. By the tens, then the hundreds of thou- 
sands, and then at the rate of a million a year, 
we saw the poorer folk of Europe clasping 
America as the Promised Land. Before long 
the oppressed Jew, the unhappy Pole, and the 
Southern Italian, as well as the ignorant Negro, 
had become a very vital part of our population. 
The older inhabitants glanced at the ^'scum of 
the earth'' and moved uptown. More and 
more, however, the newcomers gained a foot- 
ing, and they very nearly took possession of 
both Boston and New York. '^Out where the 
West begins,'' however, in Chicago — ^raw, noisy, 
material, but soulful Chicago — the work of 
Americanization went forward. Somehow a lit- 
tle more than in the East the inunigrant devel- 
oped hope. His son became a man of business; 



64 Africa and the War 

his daughter graduated from the University. 
The development, however, was not to be un- 
hampered. The agitator was present, the first 
faith in the new country was sometimes under- 
mined, and Chicago became the home of in- 
dustrial unrest. 

To-day we stand at the parting of the ways. 
The Germany that we fight is the very incar- 
nation of autocracy — of medievalism. For 
the freedom of the individual soul for which 
Wycliffe labored there is no place at all under a 
power that grinds everything under the crushing 
heel of militarism. That in any great civilized 

^ country to-day the ruler should actually work 
upon the theory of the divine right of kings is 
the most stupendous phenomenon in the world. 
Even Germany's philosophers have shown us 
that they are not free to do their own thinking. 
As we go forth to meet such a power — to shatter 
such a philosophy — ^we need a faith in humanity, 
in the ultimate destiny of the republic, greater 

\than the bounds of any mere race or section. 
The Revolution gave us independence; the 

^ Civil War gave us freedom; the great war now 

,'Upon us is to make us a nation. Sometimes 
people are not so clean, so refined, so learned, 



Wycliffe and the World War 65 

as we are; but a little sympathy, a little patriot- 
ism, a little tact and intelligence can work won- 
ders. Nothing now will serve for the new issues 
but insight, patience, and a genuine conception 
of democracy. As our sons or our brothers 
fight or fall in France, the same flag is over all ; 
its folds are broad enough to cover all. It knows 
no longer Anglo-Saxons, or Italians, or Negroes, 
or Jews, but Americans — Americans working 
toward one end — the assurance of democracy, 
the triumph of human freedom, the salvation 
of mankind. 

This is the message of Wycliffe to a nation 
and a world at war. 



J 



III 

LORENZO DOW* 

THIS is the record of a remarkable and 
eccentric man who devoted himself to a 
life of singular labor and self-denial. In any 
consideration of the South one could not avoid 
giving at least passing notice to Lorenzo Dow 
as the foremost itinerant preacher of his time, 
as the first Protestant who expounded the gospel 

* Very little has been written about Lorenzo Dow. There 
is an article by Emily S. Oilman in the New England Magazine j 
Vol. 20, p. 411 (June, 1899), and also one by J. H. Kennedy 
in the Magazine of Western History ,Vol. 7, p. 162. The present 
paper is based mainly upon the following works: (1) "Biogra- 
phy and Miscellany," published by Lorenzo Dow, Norwich, 
Conn., 1834; (2) "History of CosmopoHte;" or "The Four 
Volumes of Lorenzo Dow's Journal concentrated in one, con- 
taining his Experience and Travels," Wheeling, 1848; (3) 
"The DeaHngs of God, Man, and the Devil; as exemphfied 
in the Life, Experience, and Travels of Lorenzo Dow," 2 vols, 
in one. With an Introductory Essay by the Rev. John Dow- 
ling, D.D., of New York. Cincinnati, 1858. The present 
paper first appeared in the shape of two articles in the Metho- 
dist Review and the Journal of Negro History. 

66 



Lorenzo Dow 67 

in Alabama and Mississippi, and as a reformer 
who at the very moment when cotton was be- 
ginning to be supreme, presumed to tell the 
South that slavery was wrong. 

He arrests attention — this gaunt, restless 
preacher. With his long hair — his flowing beard, 
his harsh voice, and his wild gesticulation, he 
was so rude and unkempt as to startle all con- 
servative hearers. Said one of his opponents: 
^^His manners (are) clownish in the extreme; 
his habit and appearance more filthy than a 
savage Indian, his public discourses a mere 
rhapsody, the substance often an insult upon 
the gospel." Said another as to his preaching 
in Richmond: ^^Mr. Dow's clownish manners, 
his heterodox and schismatic proceedings, and 
his reflections against the Methodist Episcopal 
Church, in a late production of his on church 
government, are impositions on common sense, 
and furnish the principal reasons why he will be 
discountenanced by the Methodists." 

But he was made in the mold of heroes. In 
his lifetime he traveled not less than two hun- 
dred thousand miles, preaching to more people 
than any other man of his time. He went from 
New England to the extremities of the Union 



68 Africa and the War 

in the West again and again. Several times he 
went to Canada, once to the West Indies, and 
three times to England, everywhere drawing 
great crowds about him. Friend of the op- 
pressed, he knew no path but that of duty. 
Evangel to the pioneer, he again and again left 
the haunts of men to seek the western wilder- 
ness. Conversant with the Scriptures, intolerant 
of wrong, witty and brilliant, he assembled his 
hearers by the thousands. What can account for 
so unusual a character? What were the motives 
that prompted this man to so extraordinary 
and laborious a life? 

Lorenzo Dow was born October 16, 1777, in 
Coventry, Tolland County, Connecticut. When 
not yet four years old, he tells us, one day while 
at play he '^ suddenly fell into a muse about God 
and those places called heaven and hell." Once 
he killed a bird and was horrified for days at 
the act. Later he won a lottery prize of nine 
shillings and experienced untold remorse. An 
illness at the age of twelve gave him the short- 
ness of breath from which he suffered more and 
more throughout his hfe. About this time he 
dreamed that the Prophet Nathan came to him 
and told him that he would live only until he 



Lorenzo Dow 69 

was two-and-twenty. When thirteen he had 
another dream, this time of an old man, John 
Wesley, who showed to him the beauties of 
heaven and held out the promise that he would 
win if he was faithful to the end. A few years 
afterwards came to the town Hope Hull, 
preaching ^'This is a faithful saying, and worthy 
of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into 
the world to save sinners'^; and Lorenzo said: 
''I thought he told me all that ever I did." 
The next day the future evangehst was con- 
verted. 

But he was to be no ordinary Christian, this 
Lorenzo. Not satisfied with his early baptism, 
he had the ceremony repeated, and with twelve 
others formed a society for mutual watch and 
helpfulness. At the age of eighteen he had still 
another dream, this time seeing a brittle thread 
in the air suspended by a voice saying, ''Woe 
unto you if you preach not the gospel." Then 
Wesley himself appeared again to him in a dream 
and warned him to set out at once upon his 
mission. 

The young candidate applied to the Con- 
necticut Conference of the Methodist Church. 
He met with a reception that would have 



10 Africa and the War 

daunted any man less courageous. He best tells 
the story himself : '^ My brethren sent me home. 
Warren and Greenwich circuits, in Rhode 
Island, were the first of my career. I obeyed, 
but with a sorrowful heart. Went out a second 
time to New Hampshire, but sent home again; 
I obeyed. Afterwards went to Conference by 
direction — who rejected me, and sent me home 
again; and again I obeyed. Was taken out by 
P. W. on to Orange circuit, but in 1797 was sent 
home again; so in obedience to man I went 
home a fourth time." 

As a matter of fact there was much in the 
argument of the church against Lorenzo Dow 
at this time. The young preacher was not only 
ungraceful and ungracious in manner, but he 
had severe limitations in education and fre- 
quently assumed toward his elders an air need- 
lessly arrogant and contemptuous. On the 
other hand he must reasonably have been of- 
fended by the advice so frequently given him 
in gratuitous and patronizing fashion. How- 
ever, soon after the last rebuff just recorded, he 
says, on going out on the Granville circuit, 
'^The Lord gave me souls for my hire." Again 
making appHcation to the Conference, he was 



Lorenzo Dow 71 

admitted on trial for the first time in 1798 
and sent to Canada to break fresh ground. He 
was not satisfied with the unpromising field and 
wrote, ^^My mind was drawn to the water, 
and Ireland was on my mind." His great desire 
was to preach the gospel to the Roman Catho- 
lics beyond the sea. Accordingly, on his twenty- 
second birthday, acting solely on his own re- 
sources, the venturesome evangelist embarked 
at Montreal for Dublin. Here he had printed 
three thousand handbills to warn the people 
of the wrath to come. He attracted some atten- 
tion, but soon caught the smallpox and was 
forced to return home. Back in America, he 
communicated to the Conference his desire to 
^Hravel the country at large." The church, not 
all impressed in his favor by his going to Ire- 
land on his own accord, would do nothing more 
than admit him to his old status of being on 
trial, with appointment to the Dutchess, Co- 
lumbia, and Litchfield circuits. Depressed, 
Dow gave up the work, and, desiring a warmer 
climate, he turned his face toward the South. 
From this time forth, while he constantly ex- 
hibited a willingness to meet the church half 
way, he consistently acted with all possible in- 



72 Africa and the War 

dependence, and the church as resolutely set 
its face against him. 

Dow landed in Savannah in January, 1802. 
This was his first visit to the region that was to 
mean so much to him and in whose history he 
himself was to play so interesting a role. He 
walked on foot for hundreds of miles in Georgia 
and South Carolina, everywhere preaching the 
gospel to all classes alike. Returning to the 
North, he found that once more he could not 
come to terms with his conference. He went 
back to the South, going now by land for the 
first time. He went as far as Mississippi, then 
the wild southwestern frontier, and penetrated 
far into the country of Indians and wolves. 
Returning, in 1804 he became one of the first 
evangelists to cultivate the camp-meeting as an 
institution in central Virginia. Then he threw 
down the gauntlet to established Methodism, 
daring to speak in Baltimore while the General 
Conference of the church was in session there. 
The church replied at once, the New York Con- 
ference passing a law definitely commanding its 
churches to shut their doors against him. 

A new interest, however, now entered into 
the life of Lorenzo Dow. In courtship he w^s as 



Lorenzo Dow 73 

unconventional as in everything else. One day 
while tarrying at a Methodist tavern in Weston, 
New York, he heard that Peggy, the sister-in- 
law of the tavern-keeper, was resolved never to 
be married except to a preacher who continued 
traveling. Lorenzo saw the comely young 
woman and the rest of the story is best given 
in his own words: '^When going away I ob- 
served to her that I was going to the warm 
countries, where I had never spent a warm 
season, and it was probable I should die, as the 
warm climate destroys most of those who go 
there from a cold country; but, said I, if I am 
preserved, about a year and a 'half from now 
I am in hopes of seeing this northern country 
again, and if during this time you live and re- 
main single, and find no one that you like better 
than me, and would be willing to give me up 
twelve months out of thirteen, or three years 
out of four, to travel, and that in foreign lands, 
and never say, Do not go to your appointment, 
etc. — for if you should stand in my way I 
should pray God to remove you, which I believe 
he would answer — and if I find no one that I 
like better than I do you, perhaps something 
further may be said upon the subject; and 



74 Africa and the War 

finding her character to stand fair, I took my 
departure.'' After an absence of nearly two 
years Dow returned, late in 1804. He insisted 
upon a speedy marriage. Contrary to what one 
might expect from such an unusual beginning, 
the union was a very happy one. Always faith- 
ful to duty, Dow nevertheless cherished for his 
wife a very deep and genuine love. He was at 
no time satisfied to leave her behind, as he had 
warned her that he might do. She became the 
constant companion of his wanderings. In the 
spring of 1805 she went abroad with him, and 
their only child, a girl, Lsetitia Johnson, was 
born and died in Great Britain. For fifteen years 
Peggy inspired her husband, without a murmur 
enduring all hardship with him, until she died 
at Hebron, Connecticut, in 1820. Then there 
came a day when in an open-air sermon under 
the great elm on Bean Hill Green at Norwich, 
Dow extolled the virtues of his former com- 
panion and at the end of his sermon asked, "Is 
there any one in this congregation willing to 
take the place of my departed Peggy?" Up 
rose Lucy Dolbeare from Montville, six feet 
high, and said, "I will.'' Whether Lorenzo and 
Lucy had previously arranged this dramatic 



Lorenzo Dow 76 

proceeding we do not know. We do know, how- 
ever, that she too made a loyal companion, 
surviving her husband for several years. 

About the time of his first marriage Dow was ^ 
very busy, speaking at from five hundred to 
eight hundred meetings a year. In the year 
1805, in spite of the inconveniences of those 
days, he traveled ten thousand miles. Then he 
made ready to go again to Europe. Everything 
possible was done by the regular church to 
embarrass him on this second visit, and when 
he arrived in England he found the air far from 
cordial. He did succeed in introducing his 
camp-meetings into the country, however; and, 
although the Methodist Conference registered 
the opinion that such meetings were '^ highly 
improper in England, ^^ Dow prolonged his stay 
and planted seed which, as we shall see, was 
later to bear abundant fruit. Returning to 
America, the evangelist set out upon one of the 
most memorable periods of his life, journeying 
from New England to Florida in 1807, from 
Mississippi to New England and through the 
West in 1808, through Louisiana in 1809, 
through Georgia and North Carolina and back 
to New England in 1810, spending 1811 for the 



116 Africa and the War 

most part in New England, working southward 
to Virginia in 1812, and spending 1813 and 
1814 in the Middle and Northern states, where 
the public mind was '^ darkened more and more 
against him." More than once he was forced to 
engage in controversy. Typical was the judg- 
ment of the Baltimore Conference in 1809, 
when, in a matter of difference between Dow 
and one Mr. S., without Dow^s having been 
seen, opinion was given to the effect that Mr. 
S. '^had given satisfaction" to the conference. 
Some remarks of Dow's on "Church Govern- 
ment" were seized upon as the excuse for the 
treatment generally accorded him by the 
church. In spite of much hostile opinion, how- 
ever, Dow seems always to have found firm 
friends in the state of North Carolina. In 1818 
a paper in Raleigh spoke of him as follows: 
"However his independent way of thinking, 
and his unsparing candor of language may have 
offended others, he has always been treated 
here with the respect due to his disinterested 
exertions, and the strong powers of mind which 
his sermons constantly exhibit." 

His hold upon the masses was remarkable. 
No preacher so well as he understood the heart 



Lorenzo Dow 77 

of the pioneer. In a day when the '^ jerks," 
and falling and rolling on the ground, and danc- 
ing still accompanied religious emotion, he still 
knew how to give to his hearers, whether bond 
or free, the wholesome bread of life. Frequently 
he inspired an awe that was almost supersti- 
tious and made numerous converts. Sometimes 
he would make appointments a year beforehand 
and suddenly appear before a waiting congrega- 
tion like an apparition. At Montville, Con- 
necticut, a thief had stolen an axe. In the course 
of a sermon Dow said that the guilty man was 
in the congregation and had a feather on his 
nose. At once the right man was detected by 
his trying to brush away the feather. On an- 
other occasion Dow denounced a rich man who 
had recently died. He was tried for slander 
and imprisoned in the county jail. As soon as 
he was released he announced that he would 
preach about '^ another rich man." Going into 
the pulpit at the appointed time, he began to 
read: ^'And there was another rich man who 
died and — ." Here he stopped- and after a 
breathless pause he said, '' Brethren, I shall not 
mention the place this rich man went to, for 
fear he has some relatives in this congregation 



78 Africa and the War 

who will sue me." The effect was irresistible; 
but Dow heightened it by taking another text, 
preaching a most dignified sermon, and not 
again referring to the text on which he had 
started. 

Dow went again to England in 1818. He was 
not well received by the Calvinists or the 
Methodists, and of course not by the Episco- 
palians; but he found that his camp-meeting 
idea had begun twelve years before a new re- 
ligious sect, that of the Primitive Methodists, 
commonly known as '^ ranters.'' The society in 
1818 was several thousand strong, and Dow 
visited between thirty and forty of its chapels. 
Returning home he resumed his itineraries, go- 
ing in 1827 as far west as Missouri. In thinking 
of this man's work in the West we must keep 
constantly in mind of course the great difference 
made by a hundred years. In Charleston in 
1821 he was arrested for '^an alleged libel against 
the peace and dignity of the state of South 
Carolina." His wife went north, as it was not 
known but that he might be detained a long 
time; but he was released on payment of a fine 
of one dollar. In Troy also he was once ar- 
rested on a false pretense. At length, however^ 



Lorenzo Dow 79 

he rejoiced to see his enemies defeated. In 
1827 he wrote: "Those who instigated the trou- 
ble for me at Charleston, South Carolina, or 
contributed thereto, were all cut off within the 
space of three years, except Robert Y. Hayne, 
who was then the Attorney-General for the 
state, and is now the Governor for the nullifiers.^' 
In his later years Dow was interested not only 
in the salvation of sinners but also in saving his 
country from what he honestly believed to be 
the dangers of Roman Catholicism. The 
Jesuits he regarded as the stern foes of pure 
religion and republican government. Even in 
Africa to-day the issue that he foresaw is im- 
portant. This rugged pioneer was also the 
stanch opponent of slavery. He was as out- 
spoken a champion of freedom as lived in Amer- 
ica in his day. Said he: "Pride and vainglory 
on the one side, and degradation and oppression 
on the other creates on the one hand a spirit of 
contempt, and on the other a spirit of hatred 
and revenge"; and fiu'ther: "Slavery in the 
South is an evil that calls for national reform 
and repentance," a "national scourge" yet to 
be "antidoted" before the gathering and burst- 
ing of the storm. He was cordial in his relations 



80 Africa and the War 

with Negroes, was pleased to accept their hospi- 
tality, and on one occasion in Savannah, when 
Andrew Bryan, the well-known Negro minister 
of the city, had because of his preaching been 
imprisoned and submitted to other indignities, 
himself preached to the waiting and anxious 
congregation. His Journal closes with these 
remarkable words: "Where I may be this time 
twelve months, is very uncertain with me; 
whether in England, Sierra Leone, in Africa, 
West Indies, or New England — or eternity; but 
the controversy with the nations is not over, 
nor will be, until the Divine government is 
reverentially acknowledged by the human 
family." 

The year 1833 Dow spent in visiting various 
places in New York. His last tour was through 
the Cumberland and Wyoming valleys in Penn- 
sylvania. He hoped to be able to address 
Congress and to warn the members against the 
Jesuits, but was prevented by failing health. 
In 1833 he wrote in his Journal: 

I am nowin my fifty-sixth year in the journey of life; and 
enjoy better health than when but 30 or 35 years old, with 
the exception of the callous in my breast, which at times 
gives me great pain. . . . The dealings of God to me-ward, 



Lorenzo Dow 81 

have been good. I have seen his delivering hand, and felt 
the inward support of his grace, by faith and hope, which 
kept my head from sinking when the billows of affiction 
seemed to encompass me aromid. . . . And should those 
hints exempHfied in the experience of Cosmopolite be 
beneficial to any one, give God the glory. Amen and 
Amen! Farewell! 

He died at Georgetown, D. C, February 2, 
1834, and rests under a simple slab in Oak Hill 
Cemetery in Washington. 

There is only one word to describe the writ- 
ings of Lorenzo Dow — Miscellanies. Anything 
whatsoever that came to the evangelist's mind 
was set down, not always with good form, 
though frequently with witty and forceful ex- 
pression. Here are "Hints to the PubHc, or 
Thoughts on the Fulfilment of Prophecy in 
1811"; "A Journey from Babylon to Jerusa- 
lem," with a good deal of sophomoric discussion 
of natural and moral philosophy; "A Dialogue 
between the Cm"ious and the Singular," with 
some discussion of religious societies and theo- 
logical principles; " Chain of Lorenzo," an argu- 
ment on the eternal sonship of Christ; "Omni- 
farious Law Exemplified: How to Curse and 
Swear, Lie, Cheat and Kill according to Law"; 



82 Africa and the War ^ 

"Reflections on the Important Subject of Matri- 
mony/' and much more of the same sort. Just 
now, however, we are especially interested in 
the utterances against slavery, and those that 
we may read show Lorenzo Dow to have been 
as outspoken a champion of freedom as lived in 
America in his day. 

In ''Hints to the Public" warning is given 
that the world must be redeemed before the 
second coming of Christ. America has her sins 
just as well as the rest of the world. ''Slavery 
in the South, and religious establishments in the 
North, are National Evils, that call for national 
reform and repentance." 

"Strictiu-es on Church Government " has al- 
ready been referred to as bringing upon Dow 
the wrath of the Methodist Church. The gen- 
eral thesis of this publication, regarded at the 
time as so sensational, is that the Methodist 
mode of church government is the most arbi- 
trary and despotic of any in America, with the 
possible exception of that of the Shakers. Dow 
questions the far-reaching authority of Bishops 
Coke, Asbury, and McKendree, and accuses 
Asbury of being jealous of the rising power of 
Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist 



Lorenzo Dow 83 

Church. He refers at considerable length to 
the incident in a Philadelphia church which 
ultimately made Absalom Jones a rector and 
Richard Alien a bishop: ^^The colored people 
were considered by some persons as being in 
the way. They were resolved to have them re- 
moved, and placed around the walls, corners, 
etc. ; which to execute, the above expelled and 
restored man, at prayer time, did attempt to 
pull Absolem Jones from his knees, which pro- 
cedure, with its concomitants, gave rise to the 
building of an African meeting house, the first 
ever built in these middle or northern states.^' 
"A Cry from the Wilderness — Intended as a 
Timely and Solemn Warning to the People of 
the United States" is in every way one of Dow's 
most characteristic works. At this distance, 
when slavery and the Civil War are viev/ed in 
the perspective, the mystic words of the oracle 
impress one as almost uncanny: ^^In the rest 
of the southern states the influence of these 
Foreigners will be known and felt in its time, 
and the seeds from the Hory Alliance and the 
Decapigandi, who have a hand in those grades 
of Generals, from the Inquisitor to the Vicar 
General and down ...!!! I^^" The STRUG- 



84 Africa and the War 

GLE will be DREADFUL! the CUP wUl be 
BITTER! and when the agony is over, those 
who survive may see better days! FARE- 
WELL!" 

Here at least was a man with a mission — that 
mission to carry the gospel of Christ to the 
uttermost parts of the earth. He knew no 
standard but that of duty; he heeded no com- 
mand but that of his own soul. Rude, and sharp 
of speech he was, and only half -educated; but 
he was made of the stuff of heroes; and neither 
hunger, nor cold, nor powers, nor principalities, 
nor things present, nor things to come, could 
daunt him in his task. After the lapse of a 
hundred years he looms larger, not smaller, in 
the history of our Southland; and as of old we 
seem to hear again ''the voice of one crying 
in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the 
Lord." 



TV 



THOMAS CARLYLE, THE NEGRO QUESTION, AND 
THE PRESENT WORLD PROBLEM 

THOMAS CARLYLE has a unique place 
in the history of EngHsh thought. In 
an age dominated by Hberal impulses, more 
than any other man in his country he protested 
against the spirit of reform. Professedly an 
ardent disciple of liberty, and universally recog- 
nized as a seer and prophet, he stands out on 
the page of history as a reactionary surpassed 
in his own time only by Metternich. In con- 
nection with the great events of our own day he 
is revealed ever more plainly as the first great 
exponent of the theories that entered into the 
making of modern Germany and that have be- 
come so well known the world over. 

In an age of great minds Carlyle found him- 
self strangely out of sympathy with his con- 
temporaries. In 1824, much maligned after a 

85 



86 Africa and the War 

period of flattery, and for nine years practically 
an exile from England, Byron ended his career 
in a blaze of glory at Missolonghi. There was 
something in the death of the brilliant poet that 
struck the popular imagination of Europe. It 
mattered not that he died of a fever instead of on 
the field of battle; a great poet had given his 
life for the independence of Greece, and that 
was enough for an age of idealism. Byron^s 
real successor was a woman, EHzabeth Barrett 
Browning. The life of this famous writer was 
one great heart-throb. She followed with eager- 
ness the great social reforms in England in the 
reign of William IV, writing such a poem as 
''The Cry of the Children''; and in her later 
years she threw herself heart and soul into the 
cause of Italian independence and hberty. Her 
political judgment was not always sound; her 
distinguished husband, for instance, could not 
possibly follow her in her admiration for Na- 
poleon III, whom he regarded as a charla- 
tan; nevertheless the great heart of Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning was ever moved by the de- 
mands of freedom, whether the immediate 
impulse was a child in the factories of England, 
a-n Italian wishing to be free of Austria, or a 



Thomas Carlyle 87 

slave in the lowlands of America. She too struck 
the popular imagination by dying in a foreign 
country which was strugghng for hberty and 
to which she had given so much of her best 
love. One of those whom she defended as occa- 
sion offered was the exiled Victor Hugo. Such 
a novel as UHomme qui Rit, or the still greater 
Les Miserahles, may not be impeccable in form, 
but must ever stand out as a sterling effort to 
voice the soul of the oppressed. The whole 
of Europe was interested in the story of the 
great poet and patriot who felt himself honored 
by the ill will of Napoleon III. There were 
others also. Dickens wrote Oliver Twist and 
Nicholas Nicklehy, pleading for the oppressed at 
the same time that he was overthrowing the 
tradition of Scott. Macaulay, the son of an 
abolitionist, placed himseK squarely on the side 
of the Whigs and reform. Across the ocean 
Wendell Phillips was outstanding as an ideahst 
in the years that cultivated not one but many 
strong friends for freedom. On the continent 
the names of Mazzini and Kossuth are synony- 
mous with the struggles of their countrymen. 

In striking contrast to such figures as these 
stood Carlyle. One cannot understand him 



88 Africa and the War 

without taking into account his sturdy inheri- 
tance. He possessed to his dying day a certain 
independence that, strangely enough, made him 
not so much value liberty for the ordinary man 
in the street as place a premium on the one who 
was able successfully to rule others. As Mr. 
Chesterton says in his stimulating book on the 
Victorian Age in Literature, ''as an ordinary 
lowland peasant he inherited the really valuable 
historic property of the Scots, their indepen- 
dence, their fighting spirit, and their instinctive 
philosophic consideration of men merely as 
men." Something of this independence doubt- 
less accounted for the reserve, the aloofness, that 
always characterized him. At Edinburgh he 
mingled little with his fellow-students, and he 
despised the university's system of education. 
Six years he spent on the barren fields of Craig- 
enputtoch; and even when he moved down to 
London he cultivated only a few distinctly in- 
tellectual acquaintances. Such a man might 
have a few friends, and these unusually firm 
ones; but he would not have many friends, nor 
would he find place for much sympathy with the 
great mass of people. From his study society 
is seen more and more as in a mirror. Only 



Thomas Carlyle 89 

the strong man can stand out in the perspective; 
the people are largely an abstraction and do 
not count. 

Another strong influence to be observed in 
any consideration of Carlyle is that of German 
culture. An early reading of Madame de 
Stael's De VAllemagne first strongly directed his 
attention to the poets and dramatists of Ger- 
many; he drew something of his transcendental- 
ism from Novalis, and much of his political 
inspiration from Fichte. He wrote a life of 
Schiller, a laborious study of Frederick the 
Great, and edited the letters and speeches of 
Cromwell, the most German of Englishmen. Es- 
pecially did he acknowledge a debt of gratitude 
to Goethe. The very name of this great poet, 
however, reveals his shortcomings. He was 
singularly lacking in Goethe's breadth. With 
his clear vision and his fine sense of proportion 
as well as by his innate genius, Goethe has be- 
come one of the first figures in the history and 
the thought of the human race. Carlyle, how- 
ever, with his dyspepsia, his glorification of 
force — we might almost say his misanthropy — 
while sometimes he rose to the majesty of the 
seer, for the most part exhibited a lack of that 



90 Africa and the War 

proportion which comes only from a sure con- 
ception of the scientific spirit. 

We need not be astonished then at the system 
of thought that he worked out. In 1839 ap- 
peared his powerful tract on Chartism, in which 
he definitely took his stand against the hberal- 
ism that was becoming ever more popular in his 
day. '^I am not a Tory/^ he said; "no, but 
one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest 
of radicals.^' As Dr. J. G. Robertson has 
pointed out, however, in the Cambridge History 
of English Literature, "the only radicalism, as 
it now seemed to him, which would avail against 
the ills and cankers of the day was the hand of 
the just, strong man. The salvation of the work- 
ing-classes was not to be attained by political 
enfranchisement and the dicta of political 
economists, but by reverting to the conditions 
of the Middle Ages, when the laborer was still 
a serf. The freedom of the workingman was a 
delusion; it meant only freedom to be sucked 
out in the labor market, freedom to be a greater 
slave than he had ever been before. '^ The natu- 
ral successor to Chartism in such a line of think- 
ing was the series of lectures delivered the next 
year. Heroes and Hero-Worship, We are now 



Thomas Carlyle 91 

no longer left in doubt about the prophet's 
guiding principle: ''In all epochs of the world's 
history, we shall find the Great Man to have 
been the indispensable savior of his epoch; — 
the lightning, without which the fuel would 
never have burnt. The History of the World is 
the Biography of Great Men." Herohood, how- 
ever, has a distinctively German quahty: 
''Virtue, Vir-tus, manhood, herohood, is not fair- 
spoken immaculate regularity; it is, first of all, 
what the Germans well name it, Tugend {T au- 
gend, dow-iiig or Dough-tiness) , Courage and the 
Faculty to do. This basis of the matter Crom- 
well had in him." In the Latter Day Pamphlets 
of 1850, largely a reaction from the revolutions 
of 1848, the apologist for force stood fully re- 
vealed; and he now lost the friendship of one 
of the purest of souls, Mazzini. 

If Carlyle so glorified the man of brute 
strength, he could not be otherwise than dis- 
satisfied with an age that advocated reform-s. 
With science, with political economy, with de- 
mocracy, he had no sympathy; and nothing 
was more obnoxious to him than the thought of 
rule by a majority. In his Edinburgh paper, 
"Signs of the Times," he inveighed against the 



9^ Africa and the War 

age in which he was Hving somewhat as follows: 
''It is the age of Machinery, in every outward 
and inward sense of that word; the age which 
with its whole undivided might, forwards, 
teaches, and practises the great art of adapting 
means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, 
or by hand; all is by rule and calculated con- 
trivance. For the simplest operation, some 
helps and accompaniments, some cunning, ab- 
breviated process is in readiness. The living 
artisan is driven from his workshop, to make 
room for a speedier, inanimate one.'' Carlyle 
sneers as he sees something of the principle car- 
ried over into spiritual realms: "Every little 
sect among us. Unitarians, Utilitarians, Ana- 
baptists, Phrenologists, must each have its peri- 
odical, its monthly or quarterly magazine, — 
hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularis 
aura, to grind meal for the society.'' Further, 
''the whole discontent of Europe takes this 
direction. The deep, strong cry of all civilized 
nations — a cry which every one now sees, must 
and will be answered — is, Give us a reform of 
Government! A good structure of legislation, — 
a proper check upon the executive, — a wise ar- 
rangement of the judiciary, is all that is wanting 



Thomas Carlyle 93 

for human happiness. Were the laws, the gov- 
ernment, in good order, all were well with us; 
the rest would care for itself." Finally, 'Ho 
reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man 
will undertake; and all but foolish men know 
that the only solid, though a far slower reforma- 
tion, is what each begins and perfects on him- 
self:' 

Now Carlyle of course was not the only 
protest in his own day against the materiahsm 
that seemed to envelop all things. The Oxford 
Movement made itseK felt in religion, and the 
same impulse accounted for Pre-Raphaelitism in 
art. Carlyle, however, brought the discussion 
into the arena of public affairs. Professedly a 
Liberal, he was at heart an arrant Tory. Oppo- 
nent of Darwin, he himself represented better 
than anybody else the cruel doctrine of the sur- 
vival of the fittest. And either he was too ab- 
breviated in his logic or too cowardly to carry 
his system to its natural conclusion. Even as it 
is, however, he stands revealed as the direct 
progenitor of Nietzsche. The Hero is the father 
of the Ubermensch. When, therefore, Germany 
invaded France in 1870 we are not surprised to 
find Carlyle writing in the Times an appeal in 



94 Africa and the War 

behalf of the country of his love, or to know 
that for his valued services Bismarck later be- 
stowed upon him the Prussian Order of Merit. 

All of his thought as bearing on the Negro 
Carlyle summed up in his paper, ^'The Nigger 
Question/' The title speaks for itself. He had 
no sympathy for the abolitionists in America; 
so far as he could see, they were on the wrong 
road altogether; and he naturally fell on the 
side of the Confederate States in the Civil War. 
He seems interested in recording the impression 
of his friend Sterling that the Negroes of the 
West Indies were unfit for the suffrage. So to 
him indeed would be the Poles, the Hindoos, 
the Jugo-Slavs — all struggling people of our 
own day. So, too, would he defend the treat- 
ment of the Herreros by Germany in 1903. 
Such a man might have some greatness of soul, 
but he is out of touch with the onward move- 
ment of humanity. He has no place in his 
scheme for the unfortunate, the maimed, the 
uneducated — no place for pity, no place for love. 
He glorifies Caesar and Cromwell and Freder- 
ick, but he knows not the rule of Jesus Christ. 






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